A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

by Tony Fletcher

  The decision to put the Smiths straight into the studio (Elephant Studios, in the London docklands area of Wapping) to record a full album reflected Geoff Travis’s belief that they had the songs, the confidence, the dedication, and, judging by what he saw of them live as well, the skill to justify the immediate investment. With the music press and evening radio on board, he could safely assume that a Smiths album in the autumn would go some way toward compensating for the recent loss of Aztec Camera to WEA. Roddy Frame’s group (which now included a Salford boy, Craig Gannon, on second guitar), had left with Travis’s “blessing,” and Rough Trade would benefit financially from the major company’s rerelease of “Oblivious,” but the truth was, as he explained on a rare television appearance recorded around this time, he was “sick of losing groups.”

  “We were just living day to day—and that was part of the beauty and the beast of Rough Trade,” he said years later of the label’s long-standing (lack of) approach to business. His decision to secure the Smiths to a long-term deal represented “a moment when living day to day seemed less like a great philosophy than thinking a bit ahead. When you have something as good as the Smiths, you don’t want to do all the work and see them go off elsewhere.”

  The band had not been adverse to Travis’s long-term offer. In fact, they were ecstatic to be taken so seriously. “Someone is going to promise that we are going to make an album, and then another one after it?” recalled Marr. “And then another one after that? You are kidding me! It’s what you’ve always dreamed of, that you’re going to get a record contract.”

  Contrary to widespread (and subsequently widely reported) belief, the Smiths had received only a modicum of interest from major record labels at this point. “There were a couple of really dedicated young A&R scouts who would have killed to sign the band,” said Joe Moss, but these scouts could not get their bosses on board. Tony O’Connor did not carry any weight at EMI. A likeable lad at Tamla Motown’s London office named Alan Omokhoje was doing his best to revitalize the once-esteemed black American independent by trying to persuade them to sign white English rock bands, but without success. And Gordon Charlton at CBS was sufficiently enthused as to join in the stage invasions and invite the band along to his office in Soho Square. There, Marr noticed, just as Morrissey had over at EMI’s Manchester Square offices a few months earlier, the only records on display were on the wall, framed in gold and platinum as tribute to the label’s selling powers. Meanwhile, at Rough Trade—as at Factory—“you couldn’t get in the door for records, it was chaos,” said Marr. The conclusion was self-evident. “We’d already got a relationship with [Rough Trade] at that time. You were working with people you like. They were nice people. Who you respect.”

  Morrissey’s reasoning appeared very similar. “At the end of the day,” he told David Jensen, “we just thought, ‘Who would we really like to be with? Who would we like to work with once you put your calculator away and you forget about money and the rest of the world et cetera?’ And the answer is Rough Trade. We really wanted to be with them. The majors were quite frightening. Most of the people we met there seemed like principally salespeople, and they really couldn’t recognize anything unless it was immediately commercially viable or whatever, and it really didn’t appeal to us too much to be harnessed by these kind of people.”

  “We were always going to sign with Rough Trade,” said Joe Moss, whose principle of business was sufficiently straightforward: keep working with those you’re working well with. Geoff Travis duly sent up a boilerplate contract dated June 1. It was all of five pages long—more extensive, certainly, than the original two sentences Richard Scott had written up for early deals (split the profits 50–50; either party can end the deal if unhappy), but still laughably vague by major-label standards, where thirty-page contracts of convoluted legalese justifying multiple royalty deductions and complex option periods were the norm.

  The original wording on this Rough Trade contract stipulated an initial period of one year, followed by four one-year options, but it was changed, in handwriting, to a period of three years with two one-year options. It was five years/albums either way, if seen to conclusion, but the difference was crucial: it meant that the label and group would be committed to each other for three years and/or albums, regardless. This was a sign of immense faith on Rough Trade’s part; even the most lucrative major-label deals rarely committed to more than two albums, in case an act failed to live up to initial expectations and the label was left financing records that no one was going to buy.

  As for the subsequent two one-year option periods, a handwritten note at the bottom of the clause, from the band’s side, requested that “the artists should have the same options.” It was the most familiar complaint in the music business: why should only the record company get to decide whether to renew the contract? The reality, however, was that Rough Trade had never actually worked this way: Travis had let both Scritti Politti and Aztec Camera move on rather than trap them in a negative relationship. Whether anyone around the Smiths knew as much, and then hoped that they might be allowed similar freedom of movement should the day arrive, was uncertain. Regardless, this particular contract had been intended to ensure that such previous acts of generosity on Rough Trade’s part were a thing of the past. As the initial three-year period confirmed, Travis was not planning on letting the Smiths out of his sight anytime soon.

  Elsewhere, the label did make a couple of concessions at the band’s request. Rough Trade’s right to final decision on producer was eliminated entirely; so was the clause that refused the group permission to release their Rough Trade material on any other label for five years after the contract’s conclusion. The group additionally secured some control over promotional photos and press materials and were assured “mutual consent” to appear on other artists’ records. The split of “net receipts” was set at 50–50 in the UK, and an extraordinarily generous 75–25, in favor of the artist, in the rest of the world. A list of pre-net “expenses” (manufacturing, recording, promotion, etc.) was duly ticked off, one by one. Bizarrely, there was no reference to advance payments. (Typically, the list of ongoing advance payments would form part of a separate “schedule” that would nonetheless be referenced in the primary contract.) All involved recalled the initial advance being approximately £4,000.

  The biggest confusion on the contract was saved for the highly pertinent question as to who they were each actually dealing with. On the boilerplate contract, “The Company” was specified as “Rough Trade Distribution,” but the word “Records” was subsequently written in above this, as if to clarify it for the band.1 On “The Artists” side, the contract allowed for any number of individual names to be listed as members of a band. That band was written in as “The Smiths” and alongside the note, “Check with manager,” the individual names of “John Marr” and “Stephen Morrissey” [sic] were listed above. The fact that the manager did not add Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce was never a point of concern for a record label used to dealing with singularly fronted bands like Aztec Camera, the Fall, and Scritti Politti. “I knew by then that Morrissey and Johnny were the ones that counted,” said Geoff Travis. “In the nicest possible way.”

  Many of these clarifications, crossed-out queries, deleted clauses, and officious initialings were handled on the day that Geoff Travis took a train to Manchester with the intention of closing the deal. He recalled, “There was a lot of talking, lots of running ’round maypoles and chasing, hanging ’round in Joe’s upstairs room, trying to get to talk to them, and lots of whispering in corridors.” But in the end, both parties clearly preferred to sign the deal in Manchester and get on with the act of making and selling records rather than have the lawyers type it up afresh for the avoidance of doubt. Johnny Marr and Morrissey (the latter using his spidery squiggle and leaving out his first name) signed as the Smiths, Geoff Travis for Rough Trade. The contract was duly witnessed and the date of execution written in: June 24, 1983.

  For Rough
Trade, the hasty process proved immediately beneficial. Only five days after the contract was signed, the Smiths played London’s Ace club in Brixton, for the second time that month, opening for their now good friends the Sisters of Mercy. Thanks to the Peel session and increasing press, the buzz on the band was now out, and Hugh Stanley-Clarke of EMI, believing that commissioning the initial demo counted for something, and convinced that his scout Tony O’Connor was keeping the band abreast of the fact that he was now seriously interested in the band, brought a phalanx of staff (he recalled it being in the dozens) to see them in the flesh. It would have been hard for the major-label staff not to sense the spark of something very special by this point in time. But after the show, O’Connor emerged from the band’s dressing room to tell the head of A&R, sheepishly, that the band had just signed a long-term deal with Rough Trade—“much to my fucking fury,” said Stanley-Clarke, who insisted of O’Connor that “his job was to report what was going on; that’s what we’d paid for him for.” The scout was let go soon after.

  The very next night, the Smiths played at Warwick University, and this time it was CBS’s head of A&R, Muff Winwood, finally responding to Gordon Charlton’s cajoling, who showed up, excited to see the band. It was left to Joe Moss to inform him, too, that the train had already left the station.

  On September 5, the day that their second session for David Jensen was to be broadcast, the Smiths woke up to find that they were featured in Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun—albeit not in the way they had imagined when Morrissey had granted an interview to Britain’s most notorious right-wing tabloid without considering their motives. Under the headline “BAN CHILD-SEX POP SONG” PLEA TO BEEB, the paper’s “showbiz” columnist Nick Ferrari repeated one specific reference made by Dave McCulloch in his live review of the Smiths—that they performed “ ‘Climb Upon My Knee, Sonny Boy’ about picking up a seven-year-old in a park.” And he alleged another—that “Handsome Devil” contained “clear references to picking up kids for sexual kicks.” Morrissey was quoted (surely out of context), as saying “I don’t feel immoral singing about molesting children.” And Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens was called in to condemn the Smiths for their prurient subject matter and implore upon the BBC to ban the band. The result, crowed Ferrari, was that the BBC was holding an emergency meeting that day to decide whether “a song about molesting” should be broadcast on the David Jensen show.

  It was a setup, of course, and fingers were quickly pointed at Garry Bushell, who had just enacted some revenge of his own for Morrissey and McCulloch’s put-down in Sounds, using a column in the same weekly to tie a homosexual attack on a young boy (as publicized on the front page of the Sun, not so coincidentally) to McCulloch’s admittedly unsavory justification of “child-molesting” lyrics as “the kind of ultra-violent grime rock ’n’ roll needs.” “Try telling that to the mother of the 6-year-old Brighton boy mob-raped by paedophiles,” wrote Bushell, who denied that he then fed the story to the Sun; as far as he was concerned, the band—and his nemesis McCulloch—had publicly dug its own grave.

  To some extent, he was right. It was difficult to analyze the lyrics to “Handsome Devil,” or, as noted earlier, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” or, to a lesser extent but to an extent all the same, “Reel Around the Fountain” and not come away with a certain degree of unease. As a serious student of Oscar Wilde, Morrissey knew all about the aesthetic movement’s endorsement of “Greek love,” and he may have been trying to express some of their sentiments in song. Then again, he may not have been. He had, after all, left the door open to multiple interpretations, let Sounds run away with some of them, and though he had tried to clarify himself in the subsequent interview (“We do not condone child molesting”), he had nonetheless allowed a Wilde-like glibness to muddy his sincerity (“We have never molested a child”). And so, if the Sun, in its familiar position as the self-appointed guardian of British morality, had taken McCulloch’s conclusions and amplified them across its 4,000,000 print run, who was he to cry foul?2

  It was nonetheless, on the immediate face of it, an awful interruption to the Smiths’ inexorable upward rise. But unlikely though it seemed that morning, the Sun’s exposé did the Smiths multiple favors. The paper may have been taken as gospel by a significant percentage of the working-class population for its supposedly populist sympathies, but it was detested by just as many more for its pro-Thatcherite manipulation of the working class and for its malicious bloodlust. Following an incident during the previous year’s Falklands War, when the Sun had printed the front-page headline GOTCHA! to celebrate the sinking of a retreating Argentinean warship with the loss of four hundred conscripted lives, there were many in Britain who would not, in good conscience, so much as open the paper, let alone buy it. In the wake of its attack on the Smiths, the Sun’s opponents—including the majority of the music press—instantly rallied to the band’s defense, and those on the left who had barely noticed the group took them up as a worthy cause on the basis that “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend.” Besides, how were the Sun’s readers going to protest the Smiths anyway: by burning their records? “Hand in Glove” had barely sold its initial 6,000 pressing.

  The most damaging short-term effect of the Sun story turned out to be the band’s greatest blessing. As threatened in the headline, “Reel Around the Fountain” was withdrawn from broadcast on the BBC that evening. (The opening lines, “It’s time the tale were told, of how you took a child and you made him old,” were hardly going to sit well following the newspaper revelation.) This was hypocritical, given that the Smiths had recorded it for the John Peel session back in May and nobody had complained about it then, but it was more problematic in that the reason they had just recorded it again was because it was scheduled as their second single; test pressings had already been ordered and an advert stating “out now” had been placed in the September issue of the fanzine-magazine Jamming! The furor in the Sun forced the Smiths to now reflect on this choice of single. After all, if the evening producers at Radio 1 already had cold feet about the song, the prospect of getting any daytime airplay—of moving into Sun readers’ territory—was remote at best. This led to other considerations: “Reel Around the Fountain” was a ballad, some six minutes long; it was as if they were jumping straight into their “True” moment (à la the chart-topping but credibility-sapping Spandau Ballet single from earlier that year) without having laid the two or three years of groundwork.

  In the meantime, the Smiths were continuing to write material at a furious rate. And when John Walters, out of sympathy and solidarity (and as a reminder of who had found the band first) commissioned a second Peel session almost as soon as the Sun came out that September morning and forced “Reel Around the Fountain” off the airwaves, the Smiths used the opportunity to unveil no fewer than four brand-new songs. One was a beautiful ballad, “Back to the Old House.” It was the first of many that Johnny Marr, drawing on Irish traditions, wrote in a 6/8 time signature and that he performed with gorgeously precocious acoustic guitar flourishes, to which Morrissey applied some of his most yearning lyrics yet (“You never knew how much I really liked you …”). Another was the purposefully aggressive “Still Ill,” which reprised the harmonica-intro idea of “Hand in Glove” and then took the unemployment sentiment of “You’ve Got Everything Now” a step further: “England is mine, and it owes me a living, but ask me why and I’ll spit in your eye.”3 A third, a 4/4 ballad entitled “This Night Has Opened Your Eyes,” returned to the troubled parenting that had haunted “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” but this time with a much clearer lyrical message—that of unplanned parenthood (“The dream has gone but the baby is real …”), another likely rewrite of A Taste of Honey.

  And the fourth of the new songs was led by an upbeat, chiming guitar riff of the kind that Smiths songs, it could be fairly posited, had been lacking until now. That riff was a conscious tip of the guitar to Johnny Marr’s new friend Roddy Frame, whose equally exuberant g
uitar lines were about to take Aztec Camera into the top 10 with WEA’s rerelease of “Oblivious.” Marr was all too aware that Frame was one of the only successful musicians on the scene younger than him. “This Charming Man,” he admitted of the new Smiths song in question, “was me pulling my finger out because Roddy got on the radio.” For his part, as with “Hand in Glove,” Morrissey had risen to the challenge of matching the musical mood. The title enabled him to reference a word that, like “handsome,” was part of a Romantic vocabulary he wanted to (re) introduce into the lexicon of a working-class British popular culture that generally frowned on such niceties.4 After the furor over “Handsome Devil,” however, Morrissey was careful not to shout any homoeroticism from the song’s (literal) hillside, but it was insinuated in the general perception of a male vocalist singing about a male suitor all the same, with lines like “the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat” taking on a certain gravitas for those who were looking for it. Those who were not looking for it—which, Sun journalists and early Smiths obsessives aside, would have been the majority—could rejoice instead in the universal familiarity of the line “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.” Ultimately, “This Charming Man” lacked for an obvious meaning—Morrissey confessed that it was “just a collection of lines that were very important” to him that he subsequently “stitched together”—but that did not mean that it lacked for a feeling. With this song, more so than any of its predecessors (and many of its descendants), Morrissey mastered the great lyricists’ skill of saying an awful lot to those who were listening, without actually saying anything in particular to those who were scrutinizing.

  Knowing that the Smiths were presenting four previously unheard songs for this fourth BBC session, Geoff Travis and Richard Boon had announced that they would stop in to hear them in progress. They happened to walk into the Maida Vale studio that September 14 at the precise moment the Smiths were recording “This Charming Man” for the very first time. Travis took one listen and quickly voiced his instinct: “That’s a single.”